First things first: Ambient music can be many things, but there are three things it most definitely is not:

It is not merely techno slowed down. It is not just a bunch of sound effects records played at the same time.It is not boring.

If the ambient music you are used to hearing is any of these things, chuck it in the garbage, because it's a waste of your time. Ambient music requires one to listen, and these elements are all shortcomings to actually listening. It is the easy way out. And that's called 'pop music.'

Like Muzak, ambient music creates an environment that you enter while listening. Notice how no other sense is necessary for this experience: no fractals to look at, no patchouli to smell, no bean bags to lie on. These are all superfluous. All you need are your ears and an active, open mind. Ambient music can get you there—minus the jet lag, minus the come down. All it requires of you is to listen.

And when you've turned off the stereo, keep listening. Ambient music is constant. Birds, wind, cars, people—a rhythm of random, natural sounds perpetually performed: the concert of life. As John Cage has said: "Music is all around us, if we only had ears." So listen, listen to your own rhythms: your heartbeat, the sub-bass rumble of your circulating blood, the music bubbling forth in your brain. Don't tune them out because you've heard it before—it's beautiful, and it's free.

Travel deeper than your surface perceptions, listen behind the sounds, around the silent spaces. Beats begin to emerge from the clutter, voices from seemingly unintelligible sounds (my first ambient experience was hearing rhythmic voices from a running dishwasher as a child). And listen actively—we have been conditioned into passive listening, an activity that requires virtually no action. Ambient music can help you fly, but you still have to flap your arms. How hard you flap only depends on how high you want to go.

TANGERINE DREAM was a German electronic music group founded in 1967 by Edgar Froese (1944 - 2015). Early works are notable for bringing to life a new form of ambient music characterized by immersive and infinitely mysterious use of atmospheric effects coupled with an insatiable addiction for unorthodox instrumentation. May appeal to fans of Neptune Towers (Fenriz of Darkthrone side-project), for which Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze served as direct inspiration.

It's often the case, but I honesty haven't much desire to explore beyond a certain point in a band's discography, especially once they reach the point of boredom with having achieved what they set out to do (and hence the inevitable shift of gears). Still, what was good shall always be good in a way, even if only at that time and in that particular headspace within which it was encountered. There was a connection and so be it; I gain more from the memories of memories than when having to repeat an experience or be led in a direction contrary to my own. To be honest, I might never even have given any of my all-time favourites another listen after a certain point, despite knowing they where top notch or meant a lot to me etc. Basically, just move on and keep wandering the land. Completely selfish by default.

A friend of mine has gone so far past metal that he can barely even listen to it anymore. It's become more so about where it's taken him than whatever youth culture it started with. In fact only around 15% or so of what he listens to could even be called 'metal' anyway and perhaps in his shallow mind only that which retains a certain 'spirit' could ever really qualify for such a definition. Add to that, that he simply doesn't listen to much music anymore full stop anyway. But because the entire experience of living can be made light of in such a similarly beautiful way, there is no loss. When he walks in the woods, that is metal, when he tries to interpret the forms and movements of clouds, that is metal, when turmoil is crushed in the human heart, even that is metal. And when he gets excited, he could probably kill most of you with one punch.

The complete ambient cycle from start to finish (if indeed starting and finishing can even apply to such a cycle). An energy rise and subsequent energy collapse mirrored by the component parts of this structure with it's movements.

i Expansionii Decayiii Collapseiv Aftermath

The formative patterns are in full swing from the onset, there is a final movement often providing a useful contrast from those sections which structurally pervade it but often less so in the way of reflection or contemplation.

i Decayii Collapseiii Aftermathiv Genesis

Endtimes structure otherwise known as a cynical or pessimistic type view point for the cycle which displays deconstruction through abstraction. The outer last movement representing a glimmer of 'hope'.

i Collapseii Aftermathiii Genesisiv Expansion

And by now you should know what comes after expansion

How many million more ways could there be to tell a story, and a for each of those ways, how many million more variations and entry points into a given cycle (or set of cycles).

There probably needs to be more than a handful of metal releases (as album structure) to which this idea could apply in order for it to have any credibility. But for now, let it stand as an off the bat idea, which may or may not be interesting, an idea that I put forth to you!

Saw this while out and about the other day and thought it resembled the Demilich logo or something. I love it when stuff like that just springs out at you. If I think back to the time when I first got into underground metal, I remember this as seeming like a part of metal tradition i.e. there's always got to be the unreadable logo that resembles some man-made or inorganic form, neatly tucked away in the right or left hand corner depending on the overall cover design.

Of course a lot of the appeal is going to in some way depend on how well the aesthetic elements fit in with the music, but it might also be the case that aesthetic acts as a vector for a given meaning based on how moving the music is on the whole.

Some favourites of mine have been Summoning, Beherit and Darkthrone I guess. You see the logo and then it just springs out and hits you. You know it's the mark of quality!

Finnish veterans of trippy, light-hearted ambient electronica with influences from the Berlin school kosmische musik and modern 90s techno/trance. This particular album also happens to feature Beherit frontman, Nuclear Holocausto Vengeance on the mixing desk.

translation a : a rendering from one language into another b : conversionc : (1) a shift movement of a configuration to new coordinates parallel with the old (interpretations, METAPHRASE)

When Einstein cracked the space-time riddle, he pulled the rug out from under an outmoded mindscape to reveal a new vision of reality, one which replaced linear time with a flowing field of perpetual transformation. Science was merely confirming what the sourceres of old had known for centuries through magickal, alchemical and shamanic techniques: that the consentual accepted way of viewing the physical world was false. Eastern and western mystics, spiritual transcendents and enlightened lay people have always been liberated by the understanding that time and space were an unquantifiable eternity with no solidarity, no limits, no inception and no conclusion.

From this timeless field a new realm of music and experience is emerging. It is the latest in a long tradition of trance music that includes Whirling Dervishes and dancing Wu Li masters alike: the meta-rhythms of Ambient, which combines the marvels of high technology with the whole-sounds of nature to take us into a new multilapetted dimension. In order to truly understand what Ambient signifies, one needs to forego the old Newtonian classical models and Upgrade to the language of Eisteinian physics, or better yet, its inherent Tao. The unbounded creative musical intelligence weaves the Ambient fabric, for like the true world itself - its entire atmospheric essence is just one incident springing forth out of a larger, limitless reality.

Ambient music works in soundscapes that manifest an actual force, a watercourse to the most natural kind of source, forecver stretching the collective ear to take its place in the eternal flow. This fusion provides the Ambient voyager the keys to active mystery of the whole of life, knitting body, mind and spirit into a unity.

Axiom.Ambient is music for the inner cinema. It presents a cornucopia of fresh musical territory to explore, including the management of myriad risks that must be uncovered and fused to satisfy the evolving tastes and needs of its listeners and experiences. Ambient contains hidden currents that ever urge our thoughts and emotions towards a higher reality. By showing the essential order of Chaos, Ambient tracks down meaningful patterns in the noise of everyday life and strips aways the apparent randomness of musical events. It is Axiom's duty, in a sense, to uphold this higher purpose, the spiritual ideal to which the collective is committed.

The new sonic musicians live in utter defiance of entropy, spinning their own evolution invisibly, with new edge mediums, new aeon rituals, and arcane cyber-psychick mythologies. Ambient boosts the most rarefied kind of psycho-spirit troopers, arming themselves with blunted textures and singing elegies at millennium's door to all who do not serve its cause. In the end, those poor unfortunate, lashed to the wretched rails of a soul-sucking existence, will then feel the sense-sharpening winds of change, blowing a fresh new worldview down a million neural pathways into cell chambers in slo-motion until ever bland canal is buzzing with a flurry of creative brainstorming and original thinking.

Ambient is an Oracle, a symbolic message of the spirit, and Axiom.Ambient is a musical message of symbols to seekers and healers everywhere. Ambient takes us into the sacred realm of the unconscious. Here, in the infinity void, Ambient quietly bursts through the phallus of ordinary music with a resounding ethos to wake us with devotional emphasis. It is an empowering experience enough to transform ourselves and the planet. Ambient is a window through which we can transcend our ego and our thinking mind and encounter a reality beyond time and form. By tapping into the intuitive and leaving the limitations of rationality and intellect far behind, Ambient becomes an outpouring of our natural-yet-forgotten state. Listen to its sound symbols - what do they represent? Contact with the source implants recognition of our universality firmly in our consciousess: Look into your mind's eye to how you experience, and you will discover yourself as a microcosm of the universe and be reminded of your inherent worth.

Our senses are forms locked within our tribal circle of reciprocity. Shape melts into color which emerges as vibration which assumes the form of sound which transmutes into smell which grows increasingly into taste which progresses toward being touched which metamorphosizes into shape. These sensory dimensions are an orbital dance, gesticulations of one pattern being transformed into intimations of another. These gestures are flowing through a space that still has other dimensions, expressions of emotional chroma, of sound and light meshed into the ultramedium of ecstasy or ignorance, jeweled elation of heavy metal melancholy. These too, form a tribal circle of interchangeability, a spherical spectrum so ionized that we can only describe each in terms of the others. The image of Ambient is not so much a dance of gestures as a woven composition, a continuous warp where the whole sensorial dimension is a single continuum. Crossing the warp is a woof representing the dimension of meaning - moral and aesthetic values, personal or individual uniqueness, logical significance and expressive form - and the two dimensions interpenetrate so as to make distinguishable shapes in the waters of sensation. They stream together in a multi-directioned cross-flow of impulses, filling the whole volume of ambient space. In Axiom.Ambient, mind and sound are a warp of sense and woof of meaning that interpenetrate inseparably.